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New page! Daddlewater and Hathoraz make their escape! But they make it out of something weak like paper or Raditz and are almost instantly captured yet again! Can these savage vamps be bargained with or is it curtains for our hapless heroes?! Find out soon in BTB!
I’ve been having a lot of very vivid dreams recently. Has anyone else noticed that you’re often thwarted from seeing something really cool in a dream? Like there’s a plan to go somewhere really cool or see something amazing like a grand opera conducted by angels or what have you, but in the dream you never get there because something happens to distract you. You need some item or you need to do some pointless task before you can go to the exciting event and in the end you never make it there.
I have a theory about this. Your mind needs to rest, just as your body does. The mind is like a meat computer. Very complex, visually exciting dreams need more RAM or whatever. Thus, such extravaganza’s of phantasmagorical magnificence are to be avoided if rest is required.
Therefore I conclude that it is a weary brain in need of rest that distracts you from ever progressing to ‘the grand event’ (whatever that may be) as you are instead relegated to looking for your shoes/pants/a bathroom etc…. This allows the brain to rest.
This presented me with another idea. If the brain is its own separate thing that must distract ‘you’ so it can rest then what are ‘you’? We ride in a body of flesh and reside within a mind of flesh, but perhaps the body and the mind are not us. We are something else. Do souls actually exist? I’m agnostic at best and probably an atheist truth be told (even though that view of reality is admittedly very grim). I dunno. Just some strange ideas I’ve been thinking about 🙂 Are we just a combination of chemicals and electronic signals or is there more to us? Some as yet undetected force. No, I’m not on drugs, though I have been eating a lot of Bournville chocolate recently 🙂
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I’ve been thinking recently that it might be kind of neat to see how the characters of this comic would react to seeing characters from other settings as a filler idea. For example, I’ve been playing Skyrim and it made me wonder how they’d react to the Dovahkiin, or even worse a post 100% completion Dovahkiin (which requires hitting level 252 for all skill points btw). Heaven forbid they run into a JRPG boss (He’s got HOW MANY MILLION HP?!?!).
I’m not sure if the conversion between D&D and other settings is exact. I had this discussion a long time ago with someone else. I was talking about my character in a D&D game having a Str stat of 20 and they were saying about their WOW character having a much higher Strength. It’s not exactly the same thing though. For example, a LV1 character in Skyrim has 100HP minimum while a Lv1 D&D character will have somewhere between 6 and 18 HP depending on build (a dwarf barbarian with Con 16 and the ‘Toughness’ feat will have 18HP which is about as high as you can take it).
JRPGs also scale differently with FF8 having a base HP at level 1 being 250-350HP without any magic being junctioned to boost this.
So to scale a D&D character to Skyrim you’d want to times their health by about 10 I reckon (though there is more variance in D&D-Skyrim characters start out as more jack of all trade types). Conversion to a JRPG would vary but to your average Final Fantasy you’d want to multiply HP by about 20. So our LV1 dwarf barbarian would have about 180HP in Skyrim and about 360HP in a Final Fantasy game.
Damage would go up the same way. So for example my current lv9 Eldritch Knight fighter who routinely does about 50 damage per round would be doing 500 damage in Skyrim and about 1000 in FF.
Not that these formulas are perfect. Merely a demonstration that the numbers don’t mean the same thing in every setting. I’d say Skyrim and most JRPG setting are comparable in power level to D&D.You fight gods or the like at the end of some JRPGs but you fight similar beings in D&D (or you can) if you go beyond about Lv16 🙂
LV252 in Skyrim is impressive of course, but it probably equates to about LV25-30 in D&D. Very powerful indeed, but not impossible 🙂
There are of course settings that make most sword and sorcery worlds feel quite under powered. Dragonball springs to mind, as do the Marvel and DC universes. Some of my characters are powerful but nobody’s blowing up the moon any time soon 😉
Interesting to think about anyway – Thanks for commenting! 😀
No no, you misunderstand me. I’m talking about their reactions to seeing them WITHOUT scaling them to each other’s systems, and whatever craziness and misunderstandings that might ensue from that. As in that level 252 Dovahkiin is STILL level 252 when they meet. Or, as I said, the “He has HOW MANY MILLION HP!?!” reaction to seeing a JRPG boss I threw out. Of course power levels wouldn’t matter to some interactions, like a hypothetical meeting between Rath and Master Roshi (or Jiraiya). I’d say that the Monster Girl Encyclopedia world would be another interesting one where power levels don’t matter, but as much fun as that world is the highly infectious nature of the native magic would make it a big NO for any kind of non-permanent crossover.
I just feel like as comparable setting in terms of feats (the power scaling ‘death battle’ kind-Not the D&D ones) you should scale to get an accurate representation of power. Like the city watch in Skyrim start as Lv20 and cap at Lv50 but they would not all be Lv20 fighters if they were transported to a D&D setting. Arguably Skyrim is quite a low power setting. Indeed, the fact that the player does not outpace a city guard until going above Lv50 suggests that the Dovahkiin is actually quite weak compared to ordinary humans vs a D&D character, who will be a good deal stronger than your average city guard at level one and would be able to solo most settlements by the lv of 10. By this measure you could argue that the Dovahkiin is actually only a fully fledged Lv1 D&D character at about Lv60 in Skyrim (though this doesn’t quite hold water as he or she can also meaningfully contribute towards killing dragons even at very low level). The power scaling in the game is a bit screwy. Feels like a paranoid DM that made the town guard way too powerful just to mess with the players.
On the other hand you could say (as you are) that some settings are just way more powerful than others due to the arbitrary numbers assigned to HP and the like being higher in those settings (despite the fact that these much higher numbers are effectively meaningless since all other creatures in those setting also have higher HP and do more damage per hit).
I wonder what the craziest system would be? Which one has the most HP? Is there a system where every ordinary human has a billion HP and getting a paper cut or stubbing a toe does hundreds of thousands of points of damage? Where the lv200+ Dovahkiin would be instantly vaporized just by the air currents? Probably not, but I’d be interested to know 🙂 Which setting has the silliest amount of HP? Which one has a lv0 toddler with 200 million HP and that does 5 million damage per punch? Probably not a tabletop game, though the RPG I designed back in the day was a bit like that (a real mess of a system-Far too many stats).
As to how the cast might react to a crazy one million HP entity-Rath would be annoyed and shocked I think and would start training harder. Kazu would ask them if they had a beer and Zeen wouldn’t be too bothered one way or another as long as they weren’t hostile. The tanuki god would steal their clothes, I expect. Super high stats are no defense for the actions of a cartoon rules gag character 😉
Probably the craziest setting I’ve seen for damage and HP numbers is Granblue Fantasy: Relink and its ludicrous Endless Ragnarok DLC (in fact, I have it a let’s play in the other tab as I’m writing this). That DLC introduces summons to the post-game, and these things do an average of 30 MILLION damage assuming you don’t miss or get defended against. This insane sounding number still only moves the HP bar of the new post-game bosses by a small amount. The minimum power requirements to even take the tutorial quests for this DLC have your characters outputting around 1.5 million damage per hit with basic attacks (NOT skills or ultimate attacks). Its so crazy that apparently there’s no HP values that are listed on the wikis, they’re so high combat is basically the equivalent of D&D skill checks to make the bar drop rather than raw damage output.
Sounds kinda nuts 😀 I haven’t played a JRPG in a long time. I suppose the FF7 remake counts, though I’ve only played the first one of that. Maybe I’ll play part two on the PC if I can ever find the time.